The Family Dynamic

One

The Groffs

Memorial Day, the unofficial start of summer, is still sometimes cool in Cooperstown, a village in upstate New York where snow can cover patches of shaded lawn well into the first week of May. The gap between the promise of the coming summer and the reality of the weather conditions in that town was of some interest, in the eighties, to the Groff children of Cooperstown: Adam, the oldest, now a doctor and serial entrepreneur; Lauren, the middle child, now one of the most accomplished novelists of her generation; and Sarah, the youngest, currently a clinical psychology student pursuing her PhD, but also an Olympic triathlete–turned–world-class Ironman competitor.

Family tradition, as Lauren recalled, dictated that on that weekend, only weeks after the last snows had melted, their father, the esteemed Dr. Jerry Groff, would roll back the canvas covering of their pool. His children—a son and two daughters, both tall for their age—would watch quietly, arms clutched around their chests, wearing their bathing suits, as the tarp was rolled back, revealing all manner of accumulated debris on the water’s surface: unidentifiable algae, congealed muck, a dead frog, some floating earthworms. Some years, a thin coating of ice concealed what was below. Jerry Groff maintains that all of that would have been cleared away by the time any children jumped in, but he does recall the children, shrieking and laughing, teeth chattering, as he timed the event: Anyone who could stay in for a full minute would get a dollar. Lauren experienced it more as a competition; she recalled all three children standing still in stoic patience with fingers practically blue, willing time to pass, each of them hoping to display endurance that would surpass that of the other siblings. Who would bear the cold—who would stay in the longest?

This was a challenge of fortitude, if a low-stakes one; later, Sarah and Lauren would refer, half in jest, to events such as this one as the “feats of strength” exercises that characterized their family activities, even as adults. It was an exercise in toughness for kids who did not have it tough. As a child, their father had known privation, but now he had enough money to provide his family with a rambling, historic house on a lake and a pool besides. A pool might be for lounging in on puffy, airy mattresses, for flirty birthday parties, for relief from the heat, but it could also be an excuse for his children to test their mettle. Competition was fun. Pluck and determination, sometimes mixed with brute force—the family came to call that combination of qualities “Groffiness”—could be fun.

Years later, Sarah would make her living as an endurance athlete. Twice she has been an Olympic triathlete, a sheath of female muscle competing against some of the world’s most gifted athletes. In 2023, as the mother of a two-year-old, she won the women’s Ironman European Championship in Frankfurt, swimming 2.4 miles, biking 112 miles, and running a marathon, all in eight hours, fifty-four minutes, and fifty-three seconds.

Lauren, too, would rely on endurance to make a living. As a novelist and short-story writer, she does it privately, in a converted bedroom her own two children do not readily access. For five or six uninterrupted hours a day, she builds humans, bits of imagined bone and flesh and feeling, characters who populate universes, whole worlds moving through time. She creates her own reality, in order to reflect something yet unseen about the one in which she lives. She writes a draft longhand, throws it away, writes another draft, throws it away—a dozen or so for Fates and Furies, her breakout novel, one of three books for which she has been a finalist for the National Book Award.

Adam, too, would prove an exemplar in a certain kind of endurance: He simultaneously acquired an MD and an MBA, then went on to become a serial entrepreneur in the health-care field. Adam frequently jokes about being the least talented of his siblings, but Lauren credits Adam, the least publicly celebrated sibling, as the one who set the bar for the rest of them. “He’s ridiculous,” Lauren told me the first time we spoke. “He has always been the star.” She still believes that to be true—that within the family, his words carry the most weight.

Jerry and his wife, Jeannine, raised their children in an atmosphere that prized propulsion, motion, effort. The parents had endless projects and focused ambitions for themselves, but their children were never the main one. What the Groff parents expected of their children was primarily a work ethic—labors of love and otherwise.

That the Groff siblings have diversified so remarkably, however, is perhaps a reflection of the general intensity of their home life. Differentiation could serve as a form of refuge from the challenges of coming of age in a family in which so much talent and industry and mental toughness align.

On Father’s Day in June 2016, the Groff family assembled in Orford, New Hampshire, at Jerry and Jeannine’s then-new home, about twenty-five minutes from the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, where Jerry, a rheumatologist, had completed a two-year fellowship decades earlier and where Adam also works. The home, like the one in Cooperstown in which the children were raised, is sprawling, with grounds that are pastorally impressive: rolling lawn, a barn, a murky but swimmable pond, ringed by willows and trees. Inside, Jeannine has painted the rooms in historically appropriate colors, seemingly never-ending work that she proudly points out to guests; they can afford to hire people to help, but the Groffs still prefer to take care of that kind of work themselves. Parked by one of the outbuildings is usually a pickup truck that Jerry drives around town.

Jerry and Jeannine had recently moved from Cooperstown to be closer to the families of two of their three children. Sarah, the youngest, lives nearby with her husband, the professional distance runner Ben True. Adam, the oldest, lives in that area as well, with his wife, Tricia, a pediatrician, and their four children. Lauren, married to Clay Kallman, a property developer with whom she has two children, frequently spends her summer there and eventually rode out the pandemic lockdown in another home on the property in Orford, a modern space where she wrote while her two sons were taking classes online.

Sarah and Ben arrived at the gathering a bit late, on their bikes and wearing athletic gear. Although Sarah can be playful and lively in the many interviews she does on podcasts, that day she and her husband were both quiet, radiating a perceptibly tense energy that even I, a guest at the Groff home, could feel. The upcoming weeks were potentially momentous for both of them, and their minds were drifting forward to how they’d both fare physically and mentally in competition. Ben, who still holds the American record in the five-kilometer road race, was trying to qualify for the 2016 Olympics in the five thousand meters, having narrowly missed that opportunity four years earlier, hampered by a bout of Lyme disease. Sarah had already qualified, but that only intensified her stress, as, at age thirty-four, she was likely facing her last chance at a medal. She had spent the four years leading up to this moment training in what her family calls a “bubble,” a zone from which she rarely strayed, missing friends’ weddings or nieces’ and nephews’ birthdays, pushing herself through workouts so grueling that they left her mind drained of thought. She had run in hundred-degree, high-humidity conditions in Mexico and swum in fifty-degree waters in the Pacific, had woken up multiple times in an ambulance after passing out and once, for a two-month stretch, trained in excruciating pain with what turned out to be a fractured sacrum.

Sarah had met Ben not long after relocating to New Hampshire, where she had moved to find some stability and to be closer to Adam and his family. Adam is not quite so long of limb as his sisters, and yet he is a serious runner as well, a marathoner who will occasionally join Sarah on a long run. He had even done so recently, Tricia mentioned, as the family sat around a table eating lunch.

“Oh yeah? How’d that go?” Lauren asked, a little amused. There was an edge to the question: She seemed to like the idea of her older brother struggling to keep up with her younger sister.

Adam’s daughter Heidi, then four, was a blond bit of a girl, her dress pink, her cheeks pink; she also wore a pink cast on one leg, the result of a mishap with a sprinkler just a few days earlier. On the cast, Jeannine had written, “You are so tough!” As the family sat around a table on the patio, the foothills of the White Mountains visible in the distance, Heidi, who was without her crutches, started off toward the kitchen, where she had heard there were live lobsters. Various assembled members of the Groff family watched as Heidi dragged herself, in a cross between a military crawl and the toddler scrabble she’d so thoroughly outgrown, across the patio toward the steps leading up to the back entrance of the house. When she finally arrived at the steps, she looked up balefully. The question hung in the air: Was she going to keep going? Sitting there watching, well aware that I was among trained medical professionals, I worried nonetheless: I pictured tiny bones rebreaking, the cast splitting open. “Let her do it,” Tricia said. “Let her see how far she can get.”